Monthly Archives: May 2012

This supernatural romance, the first in a series from novelist Vivian Mayne, concerns a young man, Fin Milton, who together with his childhood friend, Ellie, appears destined to witness their love affair being blighted by a curse they both carry that was cast in an earlier generation.

Fin has supernatural abilities and has never been able to lead a normal life, initially he was completely unaware that he was living with the curse or that it was his destiny to be torn away from his lover every ten years.

The paranormal romance tale takes place in Cornwall and London, during modern times, and follows Fin’s quest to remove the curse, assisted by the beautiful and mystically gifted daughter of a local family with a history of criminality and violence.

For lovers of spooky stories and paranormal romance books that resonate even in present day Britain, this is a love story to cherish. A page-turner and one that will ensure you leave the lights on as you sleep.

Soon to follow is Vivian’s second book that continues the story of Fin and Ellie and their ongoing battle with the paranormal in Cornwall.

Until Amazon arrived as a major force in book retailing, aspiring writers had few choices when seeking to publish their work. And the choices themselves were fraught with dangers and delays that the publishing trade itself refused to tackle. The result: a lazy and inefficient marketplace dominated by a few powerful publishing organisations and retailers. Just the sort of place to intimidate the novice writer. Big players throw their weight around and rarely have time for newcomers. But ebooks are beyond their control. The internet, computers and ereaders mean that writers can publish to the world at large, bypassing many of the costly and time-consuming procedures associated with the traditional trade.

A book can be written in weeks, months or years – that’s a matter for the writer alone. Once, however, a manuscript is accepted by a traditional publisher – and that process itself may take many months, and sometimes years – it’s highly unlikely your book will appear for sale in any bookshop for at least six months, and more likely nine. That’s the system. That was the system that faced all new writers. Daunting! Expensive! Off-putting!

If you have a well-written draft for a book, aimed at a specific readership, large or small – but well-defined, then a sensible course for you might be to publish this as an ebook, either independently, or with the help of a dedicated ebook publishing service. In a matter of weeks you will be a published author. There will be no guarantee that you will be a wealthy published author, but your book will be out there, for millions to see . . . and the cost in terms of time and money will be but a fraction of the traditional route.

Ebooks need to be edited and proofread with the same degree of care as their printed cousins. Skimp these necessities and your book will die a death and ruin your reputation. They also need to be formatted so that they read well on ereaders such as the Amazon Kindle and then professionally listed on the internet – a task for marketing specialists Attend to the above items and you will have given your book a decent chance of success. All that’s then needed is additional publicity; a task that you alone can bolster. Don’t pay anyone to do this for you. It’s money down the drain.

How much will all this cost. Not a lot!

If you have the time and ability, editing, with a professional online to guide you as you self-edit, needn’t break the bank. Beware of any service that suggests the more you pay the better the book will be. Nonsense. If you can write then that’s not true. If you can’t . . . you should be taking a writing course; much cheaper, and more productive. Formatting your manuscript and listing the book properly requires a set number of hours, depending on the length and demands of the text, but these too need not be onerous. Once your book is published, according to the deal you strike with your ebook publisher, you should be seeing a return on your investment in weeks. A brilliant and potentially lucrative alternative to the print route.

From the top 100 books in Amazon, they don’t come much more recommended than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The book has held it’s place in Amazon’s best selling list in the top 100 for nearly two years (at the time of writing at least) and has over 1200 reviews with an average four star rating in the UK alone. In itself that is some recommendation, the author has not only prompted that many people to firstly write a review, no mean feat, but then secondly to maintain such a high standard of recommendation.Stieg Larsson could certainly have been proud of his achievement had he lived to see his success. This even more astonishing when you consider that this was his début novel and was published posthumously after his death, due to a heart attack, in 2005. Here we are in 2012 and it is still selling by the millions.

So what is the book about: It is the first of a trilogy called the The Millenium Triology and is essentially a crime novel set primarily in Sweden, Stieg Larsson’s native country.

It covers the disappearance of Harriet Vanger a member of a very wealthy Swedish family some forty years earlier. Mikael Blomkvist a journalist is hired to investigate the case and establish exactly what happened to Harriet. Her uncle in his eighties and now approaching the end of his life stongly suspects she was murdered and wants to find out exactly what happened to her. His own investigations since her disappearance have all drawn a blank which is why he turns to Blomkvist.

Blomkvist teams up with the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, to investigate the case. Both parties are to an extent damaged goods themselves. Blomkvist has just lost a libel case effectively making him a disgraced journalist and Salander, at only 24 years old, is an extremely ruthless but highly talented computer hacker who has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her legal guardian. This is not a one sided affair however, she uses a hidden camera to record his abuse and then uses that to get her revenge and freedom from his control, rather unpleasantly it has to be said.

Discoveries of corruption at the highest levels are made, surprising links back to the central characters are revealed and all the characters in the book demonstrate a deep and dark side to their past and present lives. The plot twists and turns, leads to dead ends, unanswered questions and many completely illogical discoveries. It is also a book about sexual abuse of the worst kind and the central character, Lisbeth, was construed as a result of Larsson witnessing a rape when he was only fifteen years old.

As you can see the book is now also a film and it is said that the American version is closer to the original book than the Swedish version. That’s sounds a bit unusual, and I guess that it will need to be left to you to decide if it’s true.

Purchase this Book

Available now from Amazon in Kindle format, you can be reading it in minutes if you chose the Kindle version. Use the links below:

This new History of the strategically and commercially important ‘Land of Cockaigne’, south east of Toulouse, is aimed largely at expats and tourists who have been taught little about French history. Conspiracies, cock-ups and catastrophes mark the 5000 year history of the Lauragais. It was the heartland of Catharism, and the home of Peter Paul Riquet, the pioneering genius behind its ‘Canal du Midi’, an icon of European industrialisation. The area suffered from the attention of the Vandals, the Inquisition and the Gestapo, and has lived it up on the proceeds of wheat, woad and airbuses, to the music of its troubadours.

Animals also make a contribution to proceedings, there is a canine commuter from Montauriol and a hard working donkey from Plaigne. Mischievous imps disturb the antics of their rivals, disrupt wartime supplies of bread and uncouple carriages from their engines. These lighter moments may help readers over the horrors of the thirteenth century anarchy, the truly grizzly putting down of the Cathars during the Albigensian Crusade and the Black Prince’s merciless terrorist raid. Master-Spy William of Nogaret dishonestly removes Popes and tortures Templars. Enjoy and learn from a book where Wilfrid the Hairy meets Cicero and everyone eats Cassoulet.

The Lauragais’ has been at the centre of the action in the South of France from Roman times until present day. This most superb contribution to ‘French History Books’ is meticulously detailed and highly researched, and throws much needed light on the history of the region and France in general. A book to make you cry and laugh out loud in turns.

Purchase this Book

Available now in Kindle format this French History Book is available from Amazon, you can purchase the book and be reading it in a matter of minutes. Use the links below:

Book Extracts

Below are a few short paragraphs from various chapters of the book:

“The Bosnian weaver was indeed odd: he was a pacifist in an age of violence, and his long term objective was suicide. He was a vegetarian, but ate fish in the confident belief that fish do not have sex; he was celibate in an age of love shortly to be celebrated by Troubadours; and in a world where everyone since Roman times had believed in a maximum of one God, he believed in two. This celibate, suicidal, pacifist, fish-eating, vegetarian, ‘dualist’, Bosnian weaver was, according to his enemies, addicted to secret ceremonies in which he kissed cats’ bottoms; for this reason he was called in German a ‘Kattare’ and in the Lauragais a ‘Cathar’.”

“De Montfort’s victories had serious consequences for the Lauragais: towns had been taken, commerce ruined and noble dynasties destroyed or exiled. Hundreds of dispossessed lords were wandering the roads with their families and servants. The conquerors imposed their language and their customs, installing northern Frenchmen in the Lauragais to oversee the vanquished.”

“In November 1942 the Germans occupied the Zone Nono. The young seminarists, still at Carcassonne, watched the German armoured vehicles driving in. The occupation brought oppression, exactions, and executions of hostages – and the anti-Semitic policies approved by the Vichy regime, such as the compulsory wearing of the yellow star by Jews in 1942. ”